Oklahoma sees driest 4 months since Dust Bowl

Oklahoma was drier in the four months following Thanksgiving than it has been in any similar period since 1921. That's saying a lot in the state known for the 1930s Dust Bowl, when drought and high winds generated severe dust storms that stripped the land of its topsoil.

Neighboring states are in similar shape as the drought stretches from the Louisiana Gulf coast to Colorado, and conditions are getting worse, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. The area in Texas covered by an extreme drought has tripled in the past month to 40 percent, and in Oklahoma it nearly doubled in one week to 16 percent, according to the monitor's March 29 update.

An extreme drought is declared when there's major damage to crops or pasture and widespread water shortages or restrictions.

While dozens of people in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas have lost homes to the hundreds of grassfires that have torn through the parched landscape in the past month, Oklahoma officials said more fires caused more damage as recently as 2009. This year, the biggest losses are likely to come from the drought's effect on the wheat farmers planted last fall and hoped to harvest in June, they said.

Almost all of Oklahoma is covered in some degree of drought. Only the far northeastern corner has escaped, thanks to a few big winter snowstorms.

On Jim Freudenberger's 1,500-acre farm in Coyle, only puny tufts of green poke through much of the topsoil. Freudenberger, 73, said he's weathered several droughts and floods in his decades of farming, and he's still hoping for enough rain in the next two months to save his crop. But even if it comes, he said, the result's likely to be a crapshoot: One of his fields was covered in foot-tall wheat and could be saved, but the plants in another field about 3 miles away had barely emerged late last month.